Or I think about movies where there’s this element of, “Wait, what exactly happened?” Or, “I don’t totally understand this dynamic between these people.” Those are the things that I tend to return to. Knowing that emboldened me to sort of write a book where I knew different people would like different pieces of it to different degrees. And there are parts of it that I could just reread on a loop forever, and my pleasure will never be diminished. There are parts of it that I find unbearably annoying and will never read again. Byatt, which is a book I really love and have read multiple times.

A lot of my opinions are actually in Hadley. It was that “people like stories that leave them a little bit frustrated.” Do you think that’s true? GJ: I want to ask you about something Hadley says at one point, which I thought was really interesting. But it’s just how she feels driven to live. She really gives up some human connection in order to maintain her freedom, and it’s not always easy or clear cut that that’s the right thing to do. It’s this ongoing, endless stream of decisions, and it requires real vigilance and real sacrifice. But also, I wanted to show that the decision to lead an unorthodox life isn’t just one decision. Which would have been, I think, extremely unusual. So, in some ways, I wrote her as this pure figure who follows her impulses and her desires and doesn’t question them. But she wouldn’t have had any vocabulary for those things or even any concepts for them. And I think, yeah, there’s a queerness to her and a gender fluidity to her. And part of what informs that too is just that Marian and her twin brother had this sort of feral childhood with this benignly neglectful uncle, and I think it just doesn’t really occur to her that there any limitations on her until she decides she must be a pilot, and then she starts encountering pilots who won’t give her lessons because she’s a girl. You know, I didn’t sit down and go, “I must show the hardships of women.” But if you write about a woman in that era, who wants to do something other than being a wife and mother… she was going to encounter these obstacles. And of course, it is a feminist book, in the sense that if you’re a woman and you think you have free will, that in itself is a feminist belief.

It’s funny, I’ve gotten asked a lot about the feminism of the book. I thought that friction was really interesting. In some ways, she seems ahead of her time, but of course, she wasn’t. Which I guess isn’t surprising given the impositions that were put on women 100 years ago, but thinking about Marian trying to become a pilot, she faces so many obstacles. GJ: There is an atemporality to a lot of the characters in this book, especially the women, and especially Marian.

Shipstead great circle